D. Allan Drummond
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D. Allan Drummond
@dadrummond.art
13K followers 400 following 2.2K posts
Scientist by day (drummondlab.org), artist by night (dadrummond.art). Sculpture, drawings, and other works. Obsessed with the details of the natural world. Lab posts at @drummondlab.bsky.social 🧪
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dadrummond.art
Underneath her 🔬
A bronze ant held in my hand over a wooden table top, upside down to show all of the ventral details of the sculpture. The ant is larger than my hand.
November 16, 2025 at 5:33 PM
dadrummond.art
Hello at last. ❤️ A worker ant, Camponotus species. Bronze, 14 cast pieces and two magnets, plus nuts and bolts.
A bronze ant seen from the side sitting on a wooden table top. Just in front are my fingers for scale. The ant is highly detailed, and has its mandibles wide open and antennae swiveled forward.
November 16, 2025 at 5:29 PM
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Assembly is like a kit…a somewhat fiddly kit, but I’ve made it much more fun for myself over time 🛠️
A bronze ant midway through the process of assembling the pieces and parts. In the photograph, the top of the thorax is not yet in place, and the bases of the legs, showing the way that they’re bolted in, are visible.
November 16, 2025 at 5:23 PM
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Handful o’ ant and the patinated pieces (oxidized with liver of sulfur). Now assembly… 🛠️
A black glove holding a pile of bronze insect parts over a white background A scattering of bronze insect parts on a white background, now darkened with a patina that has a small amount of iridescence.
November 16, 2025 at 12:20 AM
dadrummond.art
So much polishing! But done at last. Now patina and final polish 🛠️
Pieces and parts of a bronze worker ant laid out on a white sheet of paper. The pieces are shiny and golden in color.
November 15, 2025 at 11:13 PM
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Surface finishing coming along 🛠️
An ant head with mandibles spread, and antennae pushed forward, made out of bronze, held in my fingers against a white background.
November 15, 2025 at 8:22 PM
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Him when he was younger 🥹
An adult planthopper of the family Dictyopharidae made out of bronze and silver, sitting in my hand, with his big nose-like forehead prominence lifted into the air.
November 15, 2025 at 7:30 PM
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Mood, by noonsillustrations on IG.
A black and white drawing by noonillustrations on Instagram showing two panels of an isopod on the left the isopod is open on the right the isopod is rolled up. Underneath the panels, associated with each one, text says, “fuck it we ball“
November 14, 2025 at 2:59 PM
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Trilobites! Marine: check. Variety: check. Incredibly cool: check, check. 😎 “Adventaspis” 😜
An array of 11 trilobites in the style of Ernst Haeckel. Each of these is a bronze sculpture (this is a shot of my 2018 piece “Aspis Array”), but the idea here is to show off some of the different forms and shapes that trilobites have.
November 6, 2025 at 3:18 PM
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After a bit of grinding, assembly test complete! Now rounds of polishing… 🛠️
A bronze ant sculpture fully assembled on a cutting mat. My hand is propping up her abdomen because it’s not snap fit yet. The ant’s exoskeleton is a soft, golden bronze, and polishing will make it much shinier.
November 2, 2025 at 12:45 AM
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Ant after tornado (ready for test assembly before patina/polish) 🛠️
A jumble of bronze ant pieces sitting on a gridded cutting mat.
October 31, 2025 at 12:06 PM
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Dipped in acid, rinsed, dried, first pass with the rotary tool, and now the clean bronze shows up 🛠️
A bunch of ant pieces made of bronze in my hand over a wooden table top. The head with open mandibles is up near my fingers. The same Aunt pieces assembled into an Aunt abdomen body and head sitting in my hand over a table top
October 30, 2025 at 6:59 PM
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View from the bench: removing sprues (the pipes that let metal flow into the piece), focused on getting clean surfaces, but always love to stop and say hello to the animal when she can make an appearance…hello lady 😍
A bronze ant head assembled with mouthparts and antennae, still in very raw condition after casting, covered with firescale, held in my hand over a workbench The underside of the ant head, showing the details of the mouthparts, including the mandibles, which are spread wide
October 29, 2025 at 1:56 AM
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It’s me fr 😇🐞🦀🪰🦋🪳🦠🐜🧪
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October 27, 2025 at 2:30 PM
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Casting day 🔥🐜 One last major piece to finish for a very patient collector…here’s a complete ant, redesigned, cast in two flasks just now. Looks good, let the finishing commence! 🛠️
Close-up of the red-hot crucible in a casting machine. Two rods extend into the crucible. Both are graphite. The first blocks the crucible hole while the metal melts. The second allows me to stir the metal as it melts. A freshly cast crucible showing a red hot button on the top. This is the molten metal that has just been poured into the flask and must now cool. Two freshly cast bronze trees. A “tree” means a series of parts arranged around a central trunk. In this case, on the left are the legs, and on the right are the other pieces of the ant, including its head and body. The ant body part casting tree held in my hand so that you can better see the head of the ant with its mandibles open.
October 26, 2025 at 7:49 PM
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Cicada adult and nymph, designed and folded by @brianchandesigns.bsky.social using handmade Origamido paper. A birthday gift for my partner, keeping her company on her sabbatical 💚💚
Two folded origami cicadas on a wooden table top. On the left is an adult with wings spread, and on the right is a nymph. Both models are cleverly designed so that using a single piece of paper, and exposing either the front or back, both models show different shades of green for their eyes than for their body, and wings on the adult.
October 22, 2025 at 3:12 PM
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Same, same, same
A bronze trilobite draped upside-down on my finger, legs splayed, antennae waving
October 21, 2025 at 4:23 PM
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For #TrilobiteTuesday please enjoy this unidentified Harpetid sculpted from scratch and cast in bronze. So fun to do the textures on this guy! A little patrol boat of a creature.
A trilobite with a bell-shaped head and sweeping genal spines, perched on my index finger over a white background.
October 21, 2025 at 3:32 PM
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Went to Yosemite, saw my first black hole in the wild
A knothole in a fallen redwood in Yosemite National Park that looks suspiciously like a modern black hole
October 20, 2025 at 2:17 AM
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For #FossilFriday, one more look at Cryptolithus bellulus, a 440 million year old trilobite reconstructed in bronze. She can be disassembled to view her digestive tract and exopods/gills. Sound on for all the satisfying clicks, particularly as she’s reassembled ⚡️🧲 #sciart
October 17, 2025 at 11:00 PM
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The beast herself, Cryptolithus bellulus, reconstructed using information from extremely rare fossils with soft-tissue preservation. Solid bronze. #sciart
A golden bronze trilobite belly-up in my hand on a white background. The legs and gills of the animal are sculpted in great detail.
October 16, 2025 at 12:58 PM
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In the final hours of #WorldFossilDay please enjoy some very real Olenellus trilobites being visited by my massive bronze reconstruction including all the legs and gills. #sciart
October 16, 2025 at 3:28 AM
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🙂
A closeup of the mole crab shell showing a fain happy face in the mottled patterns
October 14, 2025 at 9:18 PM
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A face from another world
Close up view of a mole crab face seen from the top, highly complex with two stalked eyes, in my fingers.
October 14, 2025 at 8:38 PM
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Mole crab! 🦀🪏 (Emerita species) On the beach in the Bay Area, most folks are walking dogs or watching surfers. My head is in the sand 😅 Remembering my childhood trying to dig under these guys before they could burrow away. Beautiful animals…this one was baking in the sun, still alive but barely. 💔
Side view of a mole crab, teardrop-shaped with a dappled shell, in my fingers. Top view of a mole crab, teardrop-shaped with a dappled shell, in my open hand Partial ventral view of a mole crab, teardrop-shaped with a dappled shell, in my fingers.
October 14, 2025 at 8:38 PM